


To Here Knows When

by heartdecay



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: 1990s, AU, M/M, Referenced Suicide Attempt, Smoking, Summer, implied sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:07:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21691162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartdecay/pseuds/heartdecay
Summary: Here's to writing songs about someone else, here's to smoking a pack a day in another city, here's to making it to tomorrow.Grungy neighborhood kids forget about the past.
Relationships: Oma Kokichi/Saihara Shuichi
Comments: 6
Kudos: 66





	To Here Knows When

****

One day Ouma Kokichi just broke. ****

Usually when something is described as broken, an image of what-was lies in the fragments. ****

When Ouma Kokichi broke, he became unrecognizable. Every crack was glued shut with a different idea, pieces joined together at the hip with no relation to one another. Just broken little pieces with no past, no present, no explanation, and a whole lot of glue. ****

No one knows when it happened exactly, no less _how_ or _why_ more than _it_ _just_ _did_. ****

One day Ouma Kokichi just broke. And unlike the broken fences in his yard or the broken spirits of his parents that call up images of better days, Ouma Kokichi was reborn a shell with no trace left of its prior inhibitor. ****

A shell. A shell built out of nothing from nowhere with a laugh that echoes through each curling, jagged, misfit chamber before spilling back out into the world. ****

He laughs with his arms stretched as wide as his smile, he laughs and fills an empty room with his empty laugh from his empty shell, he laughs as his lies become lies about other lies. ****

He laughs and laughs and laughs until the glue in the cracks shake free and the ghost in the shell is left bare in the rubble.

Looking back, it’s kinda funny, but not like that. It’s funny in the way this all gets affectionately dubbed as _‘THE SUICIDE ATTEMPT OF ‘94’._ That’s another laugh, but at least it comes from somewhere rather than nowhere. ****

The flimsy tape replacement isn’t the spitting image of improvement, but on the rare occasion Ouma lets Saihara peel the tape back and peer inside, they try to get better instead. ****

Because the only place left to go from down is up, right? ****

_...turn your head, come back again_

_  
_ _to here knows when..._

Juxtaposed childhoods, or as Ouma likes to say, “We’re like a before and after image!” ****

Saihara’s house, closed in by a railed concrete fence and a latticed entryway, sits three stories high with paint that has never seen a drop of rain. Its neighbor, the flat footed lowlife with a barely shingled roof, nudges the price tag up a couple thousand simply by sitting next to it. ****

Ouma was the kid the neighborhood blamed when the cats went missing. Saihara was the kid that found the cats and brought them back to their owners.

“Natural foils,” as Ouma likes to say. ****

Saihara’s house is big, and empty, and Saihara scuttles through it like a small hermit crab that decided to move shells too quickly. The scuttle to-and-fro in which Saihara fucks off directly from the front door to his room to his bathroom to his kitchen to his room and back out the front door again clocks somewhere between muscle memory and depressive. The only thing that pulls Saihara off the beaten path between his fridge, toilet, bed, and door is when Ouma is over. Up to something, and over. Up and over. ****

Today’s up and over looks like two candies melted together at the forehead separated by a penchant for garage rock. Ouma has Saihara squished into the corner of the bed without the dip in the mattress. The skins of their foreheads threaten to rip when it comes time to finally peel away from one another. ****

“Listen to this song. ‘Wrote it for you, and you better like it, you hear me?” ****

Saihara, pressed in triforce of wall-wall-skull, would nod if he could. He lets out a weak little _uh-huh_ grunt instead. ****

The strum of the strings buzz through Ouma’s finger tips, rock up through his core a swarm of angry bees, prickle through Saihara’s frontal cortex, and commit themselves to memory. ****

Tears fall when the song ends with, " _Remember the suicide attempt of ninety-four?_ _‘Cause I do..._ _and just when I thought there wasn’t more,_ _there was you."_ ****

And more of the tape falls off and piles onto the bed sheets. ****

... _tiptoe down to the lonely places_

_where are you going now? don’t turn around…_

There’s a meadow five or six bike blocks away. Their bikes lay fucking in the grass under a sign that reads _d_ _on’t walk here_ , the pedals smashed through each other’s wires in a way that’ll take a big fight to undo. ****

Saihara and Ouma heed none of the warnings and trample the flowers. They split the last cigarette in the box and melt together once more under a June-July sun.

It would be the last cigarette if Saihara hadn’t thought ahead, that is, but it’s nice to feel on the nose around someone like Ouma. Someone who thinks it’s his job to keep everyone on their toes. ****

Predicting a chain smoker's next craving isn’t the deductive reasoning of a super sleuth, no, not at all. But when Ouma bitches and moans about the itches in his bones, it's more that Saihara gets to toss him a fresh pack with a smile that says _I'm_ _always thinking about you, too_. ****

The wildflowers intertwine thickly around the two of them like celebratory confetti, shadows cast in long green stems that hide them away from the rest of the world. ****

Ouma pulls the cigarette out of Saihara’s mouth with some bellyache about bumming him out. Saihara licks Ouma's fingers as they pull away with a look more bashful than his actions. Ouma snorts. “Bumming me out of this month’s allowance, that is. Thank god you aren’t as boring as most free entertainment.” ****

Jagged edges of black nail polish catch in the sun. Nothing like a thin coat of saliva and a nicotine flirting addiction to remember the sky isn’t always full of clouds. ****

Saihara’s good at blowing smoke rings and Ouma’s mad that it’s the one and only thing he’s not better at. At least that’s today’s one and only complex.

Ouma shoves his fingers into Saihara's mouth and sucks their last cigarette down to the ass. They both choke when it hits the back of the throat. 

Push comes to shove and they leave the bikes, walking ten or eleven blocks home in half the time. ****

Who wants a couple of broken grungy bikes with the wires all fucked into each other, anyway? They’ll come and fight them apart tomorrow so someone else doesn’t gotta. Promise. ****

Saihara flips the lights on as they walk through the door. Ouma swings Saihara around the corner, his back pressed up against the switch.

And they’re up to something in the dark. ****

They fuck the wires up the beaten path and bounce into the side of Saihara’s bed with the dip in it. Ouma’s on his knees with his head between Saihara’s legs faster than the clothes come off. And Ouma's thumbs stroke Saihara's thighs when he hears Saihara meet the flat of his tongue. ****

When Saihara goes back to school at the end of the week, Ouma is less recognizable than a preschool art project. Saihara smokes a pack a day in another city and thinks about Ouma all the damned time. Hopes Ouma is finding some way to enjoy washing dishes. Because if anyone can, it’s him. ****

Even as the glue crumbles and the staples bend and the tape breaks and the pom poms fall out, Ouma whistles a tune he’ll show Saihara in a couple months over a disco ball of sparkling clean bowls. ****

They don’t say “I love you” because it’s written at the ends of songs through other words and at the bottoms of cigarette packs bought for someone else. ****

They said it that one time, right before Saihara floored it through the garage door back in ‘94.

**Author's Note:**

> breaks are my bloody valentine lyrics. art is my own!
> 
> edit: a couple friends told me they didnt know what that last line meant. i left it obscure for a reason, but if it adds enough clarity: saihara (quite literally) backed out of a suicide pact with ouma, so i imagined. 
> 
> that being said, please always remember there's always, always a tomorrow. i wrote this piece from a place of having found a future after hopelessness myself, and i believe everyone has the right and capability to find that too, even if the tape falls off along the way sometimes. 💓


End file.
